~ The ongoing saga of turning a crumbling Italian ruin into a home

Tag Archives: lintels

And you thought I might be talking about an old rock group. Nope. Just in case you didn’t get enough of a workout trying to figure out which window options were going to be best, here’s your chance to think about doors, too. Three entry doors need to have decisions made about their surrounding frame. We’re not even talking about the actual door itself yet, just the way we finish the hole. And yet…this too is important.

Door number one is the main entrance. Door number two is right beside it, and leads to the old torre (which will remain a garden shed at ground level). Door number three we’re not even looking at yet, because it’s the one off the kitchen. Yes, it’s that one that used to have a bathroom attached until Marcia became a demon with a sledgehammer and removed the room. We’ll deal with that later.

The main entrance (middle), with the shed/torre entrance to its left.

The shed doorframe magically holds together with very little mortar, like old teeth you expect might pop from their gums at any moment.

The main door. Those slabs of stone at the sides used to constitute the frame, but on their skinny edges (you can see it in the top photo, where they are still intact). They fell out, and revealed a nice curve at the top. I like the width of them the way I’ve set them on either side here to check proportion.

Now for some examples of what other people have done with their doors, to see how confused we can all get.

The width of this surround gives the door a great presence and balances it. I like the roughness of the old stone, which looks like it’s seen a thing or two. Beautiful, subtle details in the little groove and the rounding of the inner edge, as well as the wedge in the centre of the lintel section.

Another door with the edge detail.

This place, showing off again (it’s in Varese Ligure). The lintel shape is similar to Godzillavilla’s with that slight curve, but our doors have a more stout proportion (dare I say short and wide?). The wedge detail looks good here, too.

A rough stone frame, also on the thinner side. I know people say one can never be too thin (or too rich), but I’m not sure the rule applies to door frames. Might work for the shed.

And last but not least – although a little too rustic for the main entry, this has gobs of charm for the shed. Its framing stones are ten times the size of our shed’s puny little old-man-teeth stones. We do have plenty of larger chunks on the property if we wanted to remake it, though.

That’s it! Comments, please. Someday we will even get to agonize over what kind of doors go inside these lovely holes we’re working on.

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Up until we started working on our beloved ruin, I hadn’t given that much thought to the small details that make a big difference to the overall look of a finished home. I’d noticed them – a little obsessively in fact – but hadn’t appreciated the complex choices behind the things I’d admired. This is presumably why architects study for years and then have to apprentice for more before they can claim to know what they’re doing.

Unfortunately I am not an architect but I’m still making decisions about the villa. Some of them have turned out great. Then there are the others, to which we will turn a blind eye forevermore. I put the exterior window framing (sills and lintels) into a B+ category. They were a decision we made before taking a really close look at all the options and what made them work. Some examples:

Primitive Sill: Window openings at their most basic. A beautiful example of a simple but charming stone arch and rough sill.

He-man Sill: This no-nonsense approach has great presence on a larger building, but has a bit of a penitentiary whiff about it (not helped by the bars of course).

He-man in a Skirt: Same grey, thick stone, but that bit of curve softens the look completely, even without the flowers.

Refined Sill: A city-slicker. This sill would know to wear a dress to the opera even when it’s held outdoors on plastic chairs.

Our Sill: Gives off a farm-house vibe, which I think is appropriate. Thick stone with a hand-chiseled face, but the sides of the opening are simply plastered. When I look at them beside the other photos, I worry that the opening as a whole is too weakly defined.

But when I look at them in the context of the whole house, I’m pretty pleased with their simplicity. With shutters and actual windows in them – those are two other, complicated decisions to make – I think they’ll actually suit our un-fancy house just fine.

Fortunately for me, I now have all of YOU to help me make these decisions. Thanks for sharing the glory and the blame! In the next couple of weeks we’re going to look at shutters, the windows themselves, doors and door frames. And we haven’t even gotten to the indoors…

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The next step in construction is to reinforce the lintels above many of the windows and doors. In Wonky Versus Perfect I railed against having to make everything plumb, but of course now that I’m looking at the existing windows and door lintels I realize there are too many variations. And while there are bigger issues for Godzillavilla than whether or not her window headers all match, I also discovered that few of the ones she currently sports are actually attractive.

So Angelo is going to get his wish and will be able to take them all apart, bung in some steel, and plaster them over again.

Now we have the problem of choice, to wit, the selections below:

The ones that don't physically need work, having already been rebuilt with mattone and concrete, are - naturally - dead ugly.

It requires a bit of imagination to see the beauty in this, but there's a nice hint of a curve - though it obviously needs help from steel to carry the beam above.

Of course the prettiest (and structurally most sound) lintel is the one that's slated for destruction because the opening is supposed to be widened for French doors leading to the garden. Now I'm rethinking this widening idea!

Then we have the Tuscan classic wood lintel, a look I love but which I'm coming to realize doesn't fit the Ligurian aesthetic. You've probably realized this is NOT a photograph of Godzillavilla...

So what do you think? This will be on the agenda for talking to Angelo in a couple of weeks, so all opinions welcome!